Cultivating and maintaining a sense of humour is often the only way we preserve our sanity and prevent explosions of negativity, but humour often comes at the expense of someone or something in the Chinese context that we don’t understand or appreciate. What we find strange and bizarre behaviour and/or customs might be perfectly normal and acceptable, at least to some.

I don’t want to offend any of my Chinese friends that may read this blog, so I need to be culturally sensitive. But if I avoid all mention of the situations that deviate from my own cultural and personal viewpoint and perspective, I won’t have anything write about. And if I can’t paint the cultural differences with the brush of humour, I will probably become negative and cynical; and there are more enough other negative voices that shout at China, her people and her ways.

What to do? 没办法 – méibànfǎ！- Can’t be helped, nothing can be done about it!